SRI Lanka batsman Kumar Sangakkara has become the first man to be named simultaneously as Wisden’s leading cricketer in the world and one of its five cricketers-of-the-year The elegant left-hander compiled 2 267 international runs in the three formats last year – no other player broke 2 000 – with five centuries and 13 fifties, and uniquely reached four figures in both Tests and one-day internationals for the third time.
A century in probably his last test on English soil at Hampshire helped ensure he was named as one of the cricketers of the year, and Sangakkara said in the Almanac, published today: “I had always wanted a Test hundred at Lord’s but, if that was not to be, then anywhere in England.”
The award is conferred by the publication’s editor – a mantle taken on this year by Lawrence Booth – on the individuals who have most shaped the English cricketing summer, and which a player can win only once.
Sangakkara also won praise for his delivery of the MCC’s Spirit of Cricket Cowdrey Lecture, reproduced in part in Wisden, in which he confronted the level of Government interference in his country’s cricket.
“Writing that speech became a deeply personal experience,” he adds. “I knew there were ways it could be misinterpreted, but it was a story I felt I needed to tell.”
Joining the 34-year-old as cricketers-of-the-year are fellow veterans Glen Chapple, Lancashire’s title-winning captain and talisman, and Worcestershire seamer Alan Richardson, the leading wicket-taker in Division One of last season’s LV= County Championship with 73.
England pair Alastair Cook, with 927 Test runs at an average of 84 in addition to his return to the one-day international side as captain, and Tim Bresnan – who took 21 Test wickets at 19, scored 189 runs at 63 and finished the summer with a 100% winning record from 10 Tests – complete the quintet.
Elsewhere in the Almanac, Booth uses his first editor’s notes to address a wide spread of topics, most notably the global shifting of focus towards Twenty20 cricket and the role of the Board of Control for Cricket in India in the governance of the world game.
Describing T20 as “a Pandora’s Box masquerading as a panacea”, Booth adds: “Outside England, the Test match increasingly resembles the quiet zone of world cricket’s gravy train: respected in theory, ignored in practice.” (PA Sport)